On the morning of October 15th, 1998, George Luz kissed his wife Del goodbye and told her he would see her in the afternoon for coffee once he finished a repair. He was 77 years old, working three days a week as a mechanic on large industrial dryers, a modest job for a man the rest of the world would come to know through a television miniseries that would premiere three years after his death. Neither he nor Del knew it was their final goodbye. He headed to a state facilities laundry, and as he worked, one of the large dryers, which weighed about 7,200 pounds, slipped off its supports and fell on him, killing him instantly.

The freak accident was a shock to everyone who knew him, and the sheer scale of the loss was measured by the number of mourners who came to say farewell: 1,600 people attended his funeral. The line stretched out the door of the funeral parlor and around the block. Bill Guarnere drove from Philadelphia to Rhode Island to be there. When his daughter Lana helped bury him, she learned something she had never known.

George had never talked much about his time in the war, and the family was stunned to find medals on his chest at the funeral home. “A Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and others,” Lana recalled. “We had no idea that he had medals. He had never told us about them.

”

George Luz was laid to rest at the Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island, in a spot his daughter described as beautiful, with a lot of flowers around. He had told Richard Winters, in one of his last letters, that it had been a wonderful life. But the man mourned by a community, and by a generation of veterans who considered him a brother, had a story that began decades earlier, in a world far from the red-brick textile mills of Rhode Island. George Luz was born on June 17th, 1921, in Fall River, Massachusetts, the son of Jose and Maria Luz, Portuguese immigrants from the island of São Miguel in the Azores who had arrived in America around the turn of the century.

Neither parent spoke English. Jose was a mill worker, and George was one of ten children — six girls and four boys. When George was young, his father moved the family to West Warwick, Rhode Island, drawn partly by work and partly by the area’s significant Portuguese community. As George Luz Jr.

noted in Marcus Brotherton’s book, We Who Are Alive and Remain, George could not speak a word of English when he started first grade, but he learned quickly. The Great Depression shaped his childhood. As a boy, he worked as a shoeshine boy to help earn money for the family, and he carried ice up several flights of stairs into people’s homes for their ice boxes. Like many young people of his time, he quit school in his junior year to help his parents make ends meet.

According to the 1940 census and his February 16th, 1942 draft card, he was working as a threader at Windsor Lace Mill in Coventry, Rhode Island. The town, not far from his parents’ home in West Warwick, had once been coined the lace capital of America, and the state had a rich history of textile manufacturing. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, George Luz felt the same call to serve his country that many young men felt. He enlisted in the Army on August 25th, 1942, in Providence, Rhode Island.

He volunteered for the paratroopers because they were considered the best of the best, and, like many who volunteered, he admitted he was drawn to the extra pay. In a rare video clip, George told interviewer Tom Kelly: “I was 21 years old and I was making about $16 a week and when they said it’s $50 a month extra, man, I just jumped at it. ” His father did not share his enthusiasm. “My father just cried,” Luz recalled.

“He didn’t want me to go. ”

Assigned to Camp Toccoa, Georgia, as a private, George Luz became part of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, under the strict command of Captain Herbert Sobel. He was a radio man and rose to the rank of Technician 4th Grade. He was a small man, 5’7” and 132 pounds, but what he lacked in size he made up for in personality.

He bonded quickly with the men of Easy Company and became known for his sense of humor, including his ability to do impressions. “Luz was one of my favorite guys,” Buck Compton recalled in his memoir. “He could mimic people and keep a whole crowd laughing. ” David Kenyon Webster wrote simply: “Everybody liked Luz.

”

His gift for imitation became legend. While Easy Company was training in England before D-Day, George mimicked Major Oliver Horton’s voice from behind a cluster of bushes, tricking Captain Sobel into cutting a Wiltshire farmer’s barbed wire fence, which let the farmer’s cows out. Colonel Strayer gave Sobel an ear beating, informing him that it could not have been Major Horton who gave the order, since Major Horton was on leave in London. The incident indeed happened in real life, albeit at night, and as in the series, George Luz was never caught.

Dick Winters described him as one of the pillars of Easy Company, possessed of a fierce loyalty to Company E that was second to none, and tough as nails. Babe Heffron, in the memoir Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends, called him the most well-liked guy in the platoon. “He was the company comedian. He could imitate people and he was always telling jokes, good jokes, not like Bill Guarnere’s jokes.

Luz was actually funny. He always told me I reminded him of his parish priest. He was a great soldier all around, 100% great American. Serious when he had to be, but he kidded with everyone he liked.

He knew who could take a joke and who couldn’t. ”

About three months before D-Day, while Easy Company was stationed in Aldbourne, England, Luz was selected to train with Britain’s 6th Airborne Division in the Salisbury Plain area of Southern England. He made a few jumps with the British, including one out of a Whitley bomber, which required him to jump through a hole in the floor of the fuselage. The arrangement was not popular with paratroopers; if you jumped too enthusiastically or mistimed it as you went into the slipstream, your face could smash off the side of the hole, causing broken noses, busted lips, or gashed chins.

Paratroopers had a name for this: the Whitley kiss. Luz made it through the hole okay, but his son said that when his father exited, he almost hit another bomber that must have been slightly out of position. He was able to avoid it and made it to the ground safely. During the D-Day drops, George Luz only made it out of the plane by a twist of fate.

He had been worried about making it to the door of the C-47 with all the gear he was carrying, which included a radio and batteries. Decades later, during a conversation with other Easy Company veterans recorded at a reunion, he described what happened next. “We’re all lined up and I am fifth man in the stick. Fifth.

And I said to Lieutenant Welsh, ‘I’ll never make the door. ’ He said, ‘Well, change with Cobb. ’”

Luz switched spots with Private Roy Cobb, a light machine gunner. Not long after the switch, Cobb was struck in the leg by flak that penetrated the fuselage.

He was groaning and unable to get to his feet. Welsh ordered that he be unhooked from the static line. He was in no shape to make the jump. Had Luz not voiced his concern about being too far from the door, it would have been him writhing in pain on the floor of the plane.

At about 1:30 a. m. , Luz kicked his leg bag containing the radio and other equipment out the door and jumped into the night. As was the case with many of the men, the prop blast tore off his leg bag.

He lost his equipment but made it safely to the ground. After landing, he was initially all alone. After several hours, he teamed up with an officer from headquarters company. He did not find his company until 7:45 in the morning.

George Luz fought with Easy Company in Normandy, the Netherlands, and Bastogne. What the series does not show is that he did not make it through the war unscathed. According to his son, he suffered an ankle injury not long after jumping into the Netherlands in September 1944, when his foot was run over by a horse-drawn carriage. The injury report states that his ankle joint was crushed between objects.

He was in the hospital until November 1944, and for the injury he received his only Purple Heart. The moment that would define a generation’s memory of George Luz came in the Bois Jacques, outside Bastogne. In the series, George is shown trying to take cover during a German shelling. He is knocked to the ground and begins to crawl toward Skip Muck and Alex Penkala’s foxhole for cover.

As the two men yell for Luz to hurry to their hole, they take a direct hit, killing them instantly. Luz witnesses the explosion in front of him. He crawls toward Carwood Lipton’s foxhole, and Lipton pulls him in. Moments later, a shell lands next to the two men, but it is a dud.

The two men stare at the shell as it slowly smolders, and Luz lights a cigarette. Lipton, who does not smoke, takes it from him and has a drag. But this depiction is not entirely accurate. In real life, it was Sergeant Robert Mann who was in the foxhole with Lipton when the dud landed, not George Luz.

The series fictionalized things to avoid introducing another character. The broader event, however, was real, and George Luz’s son read a letter his father wrote about how it actually went down, in a video posted by the YouTube channel Mark’s Game Room. “We moved up to a different position,” Luz wrote. “It was late in the afternoon when we started to dig in.

I was told to go back to battalion to get some big shovels. What took place after I got back was unbelievable. Two buddies of mine, Muck and Penkala, had dug in a hole 6-ft long by 6-ft wide by 2-ft deep. Not having a hole dug, they asked if I wouldn’t mind sharing theirs.

But, being a thick-headed Portuguee, I refused. I finally dug a slit trench 6-ft long by 1-ft deep. Then came the artillery shells falling all around. Then one fell mighty close.

As daylight came, someone asked me to wake up Muck and Penkala. I looked in the hole and saw nothing but dirt. I jumped in the hole and started digging with my hands. I felt their sleeping bags and pulled them both out.

Dead. They took a direct hit. I’ll always thank God for my thick head. ”

After discovering only a few body parts and pieces of their shredded sleeping bags, Luz sat back on his heels in the foxhole.

Shifty Powers approached and recalled seeing that Luz’s hands were covered in dirt and blood. “Luz,” said Shifty, noticing that his friend had turned his head to the side and held his gaze away. Luz shook his head. Others gathered around.

They all realized what had happened. Luz’s two good friends, 22-year-old Skip Muck and 20-year-old Alex Penkala, were gone. There was barely anything left of them. In real life, the bombardment that killed Muck and Penkala happened on January 10th, 1945, and according to some accounts, it did not happen squarely in the Bois Jacques.

It happened about three-quarters of a mile west, in the direction of Recogne, after Easy Company had moved positions the day prior. The shelling that claimed the right legs of both Bill Guarnere and Joe Toy had taken place on January 3rd; a full week had gone by before the shelling that killed Muck and Penkala. Later that month, George Luz was with Easy Company when they headed to Haguenau, France. He helped provide machine gun cover fire for the February 15th, 1945 patrol across the Moder River to gather German prisoners for intelligence.

In early April 1945, he entered Germany with Easy Company. The series shows him flirting with a German farm girl while he and Frank Perconte foraged for eggs, and the girl rejects him, slapping him in the face. That scene is fictional. There is no evidence Luz ever made such advances and got slapped by a German woman.

The scene was based on an account from David Kenyon Webster’s writings. Webster was looking for eggs with Corporal LeVon Reese, who was more focused on finding women. They came to a farm where a buxom peasant lass greeted them. Reese winked at her, gave her a cigarette and a chocolate bar.

Webster backed out the door and waited in the sun. “No dice,” Reese reported after the woman thwarted his advances. On April 28th, George Luz and other members of Easy Company came across the Nazi concentration camp Kaufering IV, near the town of Landsberg in southwest Bavaria. Kaufering IV was part of a network of eleven subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp, and Luz and the others saw evidence of Nazi abuses firsthand.

However, unlike what the series shows, Easy Company did not discover the camp; the 12th Armored Division had discovered it the day prior. The following month, Luz was with Easy Company when they explored Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest above Berchtesgaden, the Nazi playground. Fellow veterans, including David Kenyon Webster, remembered George Luz speeding around the mountain roads in a Schwimmwagen, a boat-like vehicle he had commandeered from a German. Luz and several other men were in search of alcohol, including from Hitler’s wine cellar at the Berghof.

While Easy Company was in Berchtesgaden in early May 1945, George Luz was injured in a motorcycle accident — ironically, on the day the war in Europe ended. In a letter Ronald Speirs wrote to Forrest Guth, who was on leave back in the States, Speirs informed Guth that Luz fell off a motorcycle and hurt his arm, adding that the injury was not serious. George Luz Jr. explained what happened.

His father had been in the Berchtesgaden Kaserne area and ended up walking down the road without transportation after an MP made him give up a Volkswagen command car he was driving. As he walked, Luz noticed a German soldier approaching on a motorcycle. He leveled his empty gun at the soldier, and despite the soldier’s objections, Luz commandeered the cycle. Having never driven a motorcycle, it took him 15 to 20 minutes to figure out how to ride it.

He then set off down the road. About five miles from Berchtesgaden, a few attractive German girls yelled his way, and when he turned his head to look at them, he took his eyes off the road. He crashed into a bridge abutment and was tossed from the motorcycle. His hospital record card describes the injury as friction burns to his chest and knee, as well as various bruises.

He was discharged from the hospital in June 1945. George Luz was honorably discharged from the army in November 1945. Of the time he spent with the men of Easy Company, he remarked: “It was the best 3 years of my life. ”

After the war, George Luz returned to Rhode Island.

Unlike what is stated in Band of Brothers, he did not work as a handyman. According to his son, the mistake in the series stemmed from screenwriter Eric Genderston possibly misunderstanding George Luz’s widow on the phone when she said he was handy around the house. In reality, after returning home, George had a brief stint working at a used furniture store before working as a painter. He also built houses.

He then returned to the textile industry, which he had worked in before the war, doing an apprenticeship as a lace weaver and taking a job in a lace mill. He was working in the mill as of the 1950 census. George fell in love with Delvina Rogers, the younger sister of his neighborhood friend Tony. Delvina, or Del as he called her, was six years younger than George, and like him, she came from a big family — she was one of twelve children.

Because of the age difference, they had not hung out together as kids. During the war, she had worked in a factory that made flight jackets for pilots, and she later worked as a seamstress for clothing companies. George and Delvina married in 1948. They would have three children: two boys, Steve and George Jr.

, and a daughter, Lana. Steve would eventually follow in his father’s footsteps and join the military, serving in the Air Force. George Luz was well known in his Rhode Island community and had many friends. He served as a volunteer fireman and belonged to various associations, including a Portuguese club.

He attended mass every Sunday with his wife and children at St. Anthony’s Church in West Warwick, a Roman Catholic church that had been built by Portuguese Americans shortly after World War I. After his employment in the textile industry, he worked as a machine mechanic for the state of Rhode Island, then spent 12 years working for a maintenance company called Little Rhody Machine Shop, doing preventative maintenance on pumps and motors. In the 1970s, he made the decision to go back to school to get his GED, to make up for dropping out of high school in the 11th grade to help support his family during the Depression.

George remained in touch with many of his fellow veterans from Easy Company, with whom he had always felt a strong bond. George Jr. said the men of Easy Company were always part of their family’s life and were like uncles to him. George and Del traveled to the yearly reunions, and the kids would sometimes join them.

At one reunion, George was pictured bear-hugging his good friend Bill Guarnere. His children said he was never overly affectionate when they were growing up. “He was never a huggy kissy father,” recalled George Jr. , “but as time went on, he really softened.

” By the time he had grandchildren, it was not unusual to see him crawling down the hallway on his hands and knees after the kids. In Marcus Brotherton’s book, his daughter Lana recalled a year when her aunt, her mother’s sister, was having trouble making ends meet. The aunt had six kids and not enough money to buy Christmas presents. George, who had his own family and was by no means rich, took it upon himself to buy presents for all his nieces and nephews.

“There’s no way these kids aren’t going to have toys for Christmas,” he said. Lana recalled that her parents always seemed able to stretch a buck in a million ways. “Growing up, we always had everything we needed,” she said. Richard Winters said of him: “George Luz raised a wonderful family, and lived long enough to enjoy his grandchildren.

” He had seven grandchildren and one great granddaughter. After spending 12 years as a maintenance worker at the Eleanor Slater Hospital in Rhode Island, George retired in 1986 at age 65. His retirement lasted only a month or two before he went back to work. By the late 1990s, he was working three days a week as a mechanic on large industrial dryers.

On the morning of October 15th, 1998, George Luz began the day like most other work days. He kissed his wife Del goodbye and told her he would see her in the afternoon for coffee. The dryer that fell on him weighed about 7,200 pounds. He died instantly.

“Everybody who knew my dad loved him,” said George Luz Jr. “Our dad would do anything for anybody. He was sincere, kind, and caring. A behind-the-scenes man who shunned attention.

He did things solely because they were the right things. And when he did someone a favor, he expected nothing in return. ”

Band of Brothers premiered three years after George Luz’s passing. His son, George Luz Jr.

, continues to attend reunions and has dedicated much of his life to preserving the legacy of his father and the men of Easy Company, giving talks and helping to lead Band of Brothers historical tours. As he put it: “As long as we continue to talk about them, they’ll never be forgotten. ”